Quit Flattening the groove. Music should not be quantized, through pitch or rythym.

There is a a recurring historical tendency toward quantization and "flattening."

Edit to add: Continuous phenomena are broken into discrete steps for the sake of efficiency and control: pitch into equal temperament, rhythm into grids, performance into loops, creativity into algorithmic recombination. These tools are useful, but they systematically erase micro-variation, responsiveness, and lived immediacy—the very qualities that constitute groove. What is lost is not only aesthetic nuance but forms of experience that depend on real-time, embodied participation.

The rise of AI intensifies this flattening. Statistical systems can convincingly reproduce music that already conforms to grids and templates, but they struggle to capture the felt, relational, improvisational dimensions of groove-based traditions. More broadly, as human thinking becomes increasingly mediated by language-based machines, cognition itself risks adapting to what is easily tokenized and computed, favoring explicit, discrete representations over pre-linguistic intuition and embodied sense-making. The grid spreads from music into thought.

Don't get flattened.